Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

The interrobang is just a ligature for !?, the love point is just a ligature for <3, the sarc mark is just a ligature for /s.

Friendly period is a waste, just don’t type a period, same effect

The goals of the question comma and exclamation comma can be achieved with existing constructions - how so? Like this! - that are just as parsimonious.

Irony, rhetorical question, and snark mark are actively bad: all three symbols destroy the ambiguity that is necessary for the device to function.

The Authority mark already exists[1].

Elrey and Acclamation seem to be fairly niche variations on the purpose of the standard exclamation mark - maybe a combining diacritic mark is the solution!̇ Typists of languages other than English are already there, just waiting to welcome you!̫̑

That leaves Certitude and Doubt. Certainly their case is the strongest, as they replace entire words. Perhaps using entire words is a good thing, though; the spectrum of certitude might be richer than the all-or-nothing binary choice offered by two characters…

1: The current form has the distinct advantage of actually providing some information about the authority being claimed.

It would seem strange to represent doubt by that squiggle though when clearly it is represented by an x in a blue circle.

Hear! Hear!

> The interrobang is just a ligature for !?, the love point is just a ligature for <3, the sarc mark is just a ligature for /s.

And and-per-se-and is just a ligature for et, and yet...

> The goals of the question comma and exclamation comma can be achieved with existing constructions - how so? Like this! - that are just as parsimonious.

That's seems at least as non-standard (even ignoring the use of hyphens in place of en-dashes) as question-comma/exclamation comma. You can set of a phrase with dashes but that doesn't demote sentence-ending punctuation/capitalization combos within it. (To be fair I've seen other people do something similar rarely, but mostly by also not using initial caps to avoid signalling a new sentence; that’s clearer if still unusual; I’d be surprised if any style manual recommends that construction, with capitalization after the question mark, with the semantics targeted.)

& is not just a ligature for et. It can be used that way, as in “&c.” for “etc.”, but it has a second usage as a symbol to replace the word “and”. Replacing a whole word is one of the best arguments for having a symbol, and there’s no caveat of a spectrum of meaning for “and” like there is for “certainly” & “perhaps”. (See % for percentage/pct., and $ for dollar, as other examples of words with singular meanings we want to abbreviate.)

Regarding the hyphen/dash… yeah, I agree I tortured it a fair bit because I wanted to squeeze in both ! and ?.

The general principle that you can separate clauses with commas or with dashes is solid. The stated purpose of the exclamation/question comma is to inject an exclamation/question mark into just a clause rather than the whole sentence, and that’s exactly what using dashes achieves.

> but it has a second usage as a symbol to replace the word “and”

You know that thing where people drop latin into the middle of an English sentence? That used to be more common, because literacy and a use for writing and basic fluency in written Latin were more correlated?

It’s exactly that which is why an ligature of “et” (“and” in Latin) became so common that, for quite a while, it was treated as an English letter (whose name—“and per se and”—before it got slurred into the modern form also has the same kind of Latin drop-in in the middle of it.)

I do know the origin, but if we permit any influence of descriptive linguistics at all, we have to admit that people are not substituting et for and and then rendering et as &. They are directly substituting & for and, so it’s a distinct usage imo.

Yes, the historical reason they make that direct substitution is because they have read enough writing from authors making the indirect, via-Latin substitution to deduce the apparent meaning of the symbol. You can also support the claim that the direct substitution is distinct with some experimental linguistics: find someone using & and replace it with et, they will tell you that’s wrong, but replace it with and and they’ll be okay with it.

> the sarc mark is just a ligature for /s

The use of which is a curiously American phenomenon.

Since the essence of sarcasm is scathing subtlety, writing "/s" looks rather, odd?

..... and perhaps here, I should pre-empt replies from those who think they need sarcasm pointing out to them, to say you have missed the point! It certainly highlights a difference between the US and British piss-taking culture.

EDIT: Though come to think of it, I have seen a few Brits writing "/s" on Reddit. Probably because they don't want their posts downvoted (and loose imaginary internet points) by those from the US who don't share the piss take.

As a Brit I think /s is occasionally useful. Sarcasm often depends on tone of voice, plus on the internet no one knows you're a dog, so I'll sometimes add it to things that could be misinterpreted.

Writing /s is essentially making fun of the people who might need the /s. It’s saying “I shouldn’t have to mark this as sarcasm, but you’re not smart enough to recognize it as such, so I’m marking it for you, stupid.”

> Friendly period is a waste, just don’t type a period, same effect

Almost nobody wants to have to start every new sentence on a new line.

My intuition says periods don’t have that “sharp” feeling when they’re followed by another sentence, only when they’re the last sentence on the line

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